Response Andrew Sanders

My topic was on a method to alert users to their data usage if for them it is unclear if they are. My solution for this was to provide alerts for when data was in use and allow the user to disable their data flow if they so desired with the push of a button. One of my critiques on this said, “How will this affect app development and flow?” I believe this will have a small impact on app development and flow as designers must already account for data loss in the cases where a signal won’t reach or the user manually turns it off via a settings option. My proposed solution only reduces the steps necessary to turn the data off and provide a, hopefully, helpful alert when they are using data. It also doesn’t turn data off until the user explicitly tells it to by hitting the disable button. So, even when the pop-up is displayed data is still on. However, in thinking about this critique I considered something I previously hadn’t, what about background operations, such as polling for messages, that are constantly using small amounts of data? In its current design the user would be plagued by alerts popping up constantly. To address this I would revise the solution to have a threshold where data consumption rate below it wouldn’t set the alert off, but above would.